The Quest

Alex mentioned liking this when he was younger, and I noticed it was free on Amazon Prime, and here we are. Apparently Jean-Claude van Damme's first time directing a movie.

He plays Christopher Dubois, who is some sort of street performer/pickpocket/leader of a whole gang of Artful Dodgers in 1920 New York. He manages to piss off a gangster and some cops, ends up a slave on a ship headed to Asia. He gets rescued by a former British naval captain turned smuggler and black marketeer (played by Roger Moore), who dumps Dubois on Muay Thai island because he thinks he has promise as a fighter.

By the next time Moore sees Dubois, he's fully embraced Muay Thai fighting and is an almost dead-eyed asskicker determined to compete in a tournament of the world's greatest fighters, for the chance to win a big gold dragon. So Moore "helps", by having the pretend to be porters for the American heavyweight champion, who received an invite. The champ figures out the ruse eventually, but is impressed enough to give Dubois his spot.

It's such a strange and convoluted way to get the character to that point. I guess the thief backstory is important because it not only gives him a way to piss off people that would make him need to run, but also makes him ethically flexible enough to work with Moore and his compatriot. And traveling with the heavyweight champ gives him time with someone with a more noble competitive spirit, who can encourage his better nature to come out.

I feel like it'd work better if he put some of that other stuff to use in the tournament. Maybe something he picked up from his brief fight with the champ, or the balance and acrobatics he used escaping the cops. Especially since the guy he fights last, a very large fellow hailing from Mongolia, had already crushed Siam's representative, who learned Muay Thai from the same guy as Dubois. How you gonna win doing the same stuff that already got the other guy's back broken? But if that stuff was there, I didn't see it. I mean, there's a sequence where he punches the big guy in the face a lot, but they didn't really seem like boxing punches.

There's also a weird bit during the final fight where he gets punched out of the ring and down the ramp. When he starts to get up, he sees all the people from the audience, gathered around the big guy, leaning in and staring at him. I thought it was some hallucination, Dubois fighting his inner fears in the form of all the doubters and people who keep expecting him to fold. No, everyone had simply moved over there to look at him like that. Then he got up, stepped outside, and the fight continued. Kinda weird.

It seems like van Damme made the movie I imagine most Street Fighter fans were expecting/hoping for from his actual Street Fighter movie. A bunch of fighters from around the world competing in a tournament to find the world's best fighter. Instead we got, whatever the hell Street Fighter was (pour one out for Raul Julia and make it rain Bison Bucks.) 

Also, they use a gong to signal the start of the fight, so I kept wanting someone to scream "MORTAL KOMBAT!" Since no one in the movie would, I had to do it myself.